Hey there!
I’m experiencing a lot of issues with Engine COMPs in the new TD release. They crash all the time. And when I set up a .tox in a Base all is working well but not when I load them into the Engine e.g. Parameter Executes don’t work, Bases inside the Engine don’t refresh, Parameter DATs inside the Engine crash the entire project etc.
Please fix this, I’ve tried a lot and I can’t use Engines at all like this 
Thanks!
bileam
Hi - sorry you’re running into so many issues.
Could you contact support@derivative.ca with a link to this post so we can go into more depth? It sounds like some of these may be issues we don’t already know about.
Thanks!
New build is up which has a number of Engine COMP fixes, check out 2022.26590 and let us know how it goes for you.
Amazing thanks a lot! It works well now. I have actually changed my system to not use Engines now but I’m glad to know it’s fixed.
Apologies for that.
Engines have been broken for me since they exist. It’s fine to have one thing load in an engine COMP and leave it running, but dynamically loading and unloading engines with different tox files has always resulted in a crash sooner or later. Maybe it crashes only 1 times out of 10, but for production this is unusable. I wished Derivative would spend more time fixing TouchEngine in touch before releasing touchengines for other softwares -_-
I mean it has the potential to put all those extra CPU cores to good use and avoid locking up the main thread but like this it’s just not feasible to use it in any real project!
I come back to try engineCOMP every year or so, and whenever I do, something always breaks, either with data flowing I/O of the engineCOMP, or cooking within the engine itself. But I’m typically trying to use it in very complex setups.
engineCOMP is a wonderful concept, but it feels like it needs more “in the field” testing. Artist/user toes are probably really beneficial for the Derivative team to see how exactly we’re using this stuff… probably in ways that weren’t expected or anticipated.
Hey folks,
If you have cases that you can share and we can reproduce, I am sure we will jump on the issue for it to get fixed.
We are spending time testing the Engine internally, with the Engine COMP, we might not hit all the bugs with our test cases…
Anything you can share is extremely valuable.
Best,
Michel
Ah didn’t think of keeping a copy before I changed everything back to loading toxes in base comps… and cleaned out the mess of dump files and backup versions that started to pile up so thats gone.
In an empty project, I can load complex tox files in an engine and unload/reload all I want without a crash, but when I try to manage the loading/unloading in an A/B style deck to fade between different tox files, where I check the state of the engine COMPs during the fade process, it tends to crash easily even with very simple patches loaded in.
When I encounter it again I’ll upload the toe and dump files
I’m wondering how it works now in 2022.31030 as this original post is very old. In the last 2 months there have been a couple dozen fixes at least to the Engine COMP, major improvements.
@dylanroscover said
Artist/user toes are probably really beneficial for the Derivative team to see how exactly we’re using this stuff…
This is exactly the case. For example, we haven’t tested (or imagined) a scenario where people would be dynamically loading/unloading as live comps for an A/B mixer as @incognite mentioned. Typical testing setups we have are distributing load and doing things that would have taken 2,3,4 .toe files previously. This is probably simply because we have a bias on Engine COMP usage cases from the problems we originally sought to fix with Engine COMP, (ie. multiple .toe files, you wouldn’t have run A/B comps in separate .toe files previously for example). In cases of running .tox that are loaded once, the Engine COMP is proving very reliable and stable now.
Even this short forum thread has brought to light new examples of how people are now trying to use Engine COMP in their setups, and we need to see these to evaluate how to make the Engine COMP work better with them.
So please send us your projects that are giving you problems, as soon as you find them, you know we can iterate on this fast so you can keep working. It’s the only way to improve the feature.
can confirm, getting loads of crashes with dynamically loaded .tox files into a/b mixer type scenario. hard to isolate. feels random.
also would be great it the engine comp could output errors into the textport. atm. if something goes wrong, it’s just blank, and no errors.
Hi @radarboy3000 - as Ben and Michel say above, what really enables us to fix things like this is reproducible cases. If you could send a .toe and the required .tox to reproduce this, we can take a look. Either attach them here, or e-mail support@derivative.ca and mention this forum thread. If you also let us know the TouchDesigner version and OS you’re on, that will help us recreate the problem. Thanks!
We’re looking to improve error reporting for Engine COMP components.
Another year, another check-in.
This time I have a reproducible case. I thought to circumvent the issues with rapidly loading and unloading tox files in engine COMP, by first loading a tox loader once. Then loading the visual patches inside that loader in a base comp, then copying the parameters to the top level so they are accessible from the engine COMP.
But its behaving very bad both in 2022 and 2023 versions. When I init the engine COMP and then use the loader it works fine, but after a couple loads a bunch of problems happen (not necessarily simultaneously)
Also the chop outputs can not be trusted for triggers, a trigger that is fired inside the engine and sent to an out CHOP, sometimes arrives multiple times. Sometimes setting the output buffer to 0 or 1 seems to fix it but that also seems to increase the likelihood of any of the above bugs happening (but that might just be a feeling)
The loader is a modified version of my main visual player patch, with all UI components and logic removed. When I run it without engine it works flawlessly and I can rapidly load in many tox files without any issues.
playerEngine.tox (23.4 KB)
and some crash reports:
TouchEngineCrash.2023.11340.2.dmp (269.8 KB)
TouchEngineCrash.2022.35320.6.dmp (243.9 KB)
TouchEngineCrash.2022.35320.5.dmp (244.0 KB)
TouchEngineCrash.2022.35320.4.dmp (290.0 KB)
TouchEngineCrash.2022.35320.3.dmp (237.1 KB)
Thanks for this, great to have a file to reproduce the issues. We can recreate some of them here - taking a look.